@ PierreKory: in 2019, 71% of Americans reported high trust in doctors and hospitals. By 2024, that number fell to 40%.

At Sen. Ron Johnson’s roundtable on COVID hospital protocols, Dr. Pierre Kory pointed to one of the lasting consequences of the pandemic: the collapse of trust in American medicine.

“They failed us. The entire system failed us.”

He believes healthcare professionals themselves were subjected to an extraordinary campaign of messaging and too many stopped doing the very thing science requires: questioning.

“Science… literally should be founded on skepticism.”

Kory called it “epistemic capture” — control over what people come to accept as knowledge — arguing that pharmaceutical influence reaches from the media to the medical journals physicians rely on.

His message to doctors was clear: credentials are not a substitute for scrutiny. Institutions are not above questioning. And science cannot function without skepticism.

“They were too trusting in the institutions of science, and that is how we got to where we are today.”

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